Cutting the Confederacy down to size

From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

A curious new feature has emerged in the public spaces of some American cities over the past decade: the empty plinth. In New Orleans, a barren white column rises more than 18 metres high; in Baltimore, a block of granite sits mutely, ringed by trees. Both are missing the large statues of Confederate army leaders that stood upon them for nearly a century.

Hundreds of monuments to the Confederate cause – the slavery-preserving side in the 19th-century Civil War – were erected throughout the American South in the early 20th century. A transatlantic offshoot of Europe’s nationalist ‘monumentomania’, the public display of such markers was framed as memorialisation and the preservation of heritage, but functioned as a quiet campaign of terror in the deeply segregated region. Since 2015, as part of the nation’s overdue racial reckonings, many of these statues have been vandalised and more than 200 (of nearly 700) have been removed – either by protestors, or by city decree in secret night operations.

Where should these statues go? What can they communicate, ousted from their context and places of honour? These difficult questions of historiography reverberate through the powerful and disturbingly timely exhibition ‘Monuments’, in which 11 decommissioned statues – transformed, defaced or in pristine condition – are shown alongside contemporary works and new commissions by 19 artists. (Such questions are also dangerous and capable of inciting violence, prompting additional security measures at the exhibition’s two venues.)

One answer is found in Kara Walker’s treatment of a statue of Confederate martyr Stonewall Jackson. The bronze statue previously stood outside the county courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, and when calls for its removal were approved by the city council in 2017, it became the focal point of a notorious and deadly white supremacist rally. After its removal, Hamza Walker, director of The Brick, arranged to give it to Kara Walker as the most loaded and historically charged of raw artistic materials. She sliced apart and reconstructed the general and his horse, creating a monstrous cubist tower of dismembered arms, hooves, armour and haunches, with Jackson’s faceless head hanging from the horse’s neck. Details like the prominent veins on the horse’s leg and deep creases in Jackson’s boot are rendered uncanny in their jarring positions, while the title, Unmanned Drone (2023), asserts that such statues are weapons, sent into public spaces to intimidate and oppress.

Even in the context of an art exhibition thousands of kilometres from where they last stood, these ‘weapons’ still hold a disturbing power. They are deeply profane, like something you aren’t supposed to see, evoking a feeling akin to hearing a racial slur. When the monuments are juxtaposed with contemporary artworks, new interpretations of the vast and lingering legacy of America’s shameful past emerge. For example, in one gallery, Jon Henry’s photographic series Stranger Fruit (2014–21) depicts Black mothers solemnly holding their limp sons in the Pietá pose – referring to the murders of unarmed Black men. These haunting images face a large Confederate statue of a nurse cradling a wounded soldier, erected in Baltimore in 1917 and sponsored by the Daughters of the Confederacy, a group responsible for the majority of Confederate monuments and still active today. Placed between them, cleverly, is Descendant (2025) by Karon Davis, a life-sized plaster-cast statue of her son, a young Black man standing confidently on a plinth and dangling a tiny replica of a Confederate equestrian statue from his hand, by the tail.

History can be ossified into permanent forms, but it is always subject to revision, alteration and disarmament. Nona Faustine’s arresting photographic series, White Shoe, depicts the artist posing at New York City sites related to slavery. In They Tagged the Land With Trophies and Institutions from Their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC (2013), she is shown nude, pushing against a massive stone pillar, starkly invoking the power dynamics still at play in our public spaces. In Bethany Collins’s Love is Dangerous (2024–25), the artist carved speckled pink marble from the base of a decommissioned Confederate statue into delicate rose petals, an elegant reference to the contested origins of the Memorial Day holiday recognising fallen veterans.

A commission by operatic singer Davóne Tines and film-maker Julie Dash, HOMEGOING (2025) was filmed in Charleston’s historic Mother Emanuel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, where nine church members were murdered in a 2015 hate crime, and at the Angel Tree, a massive, 500-year-old oak tree in South Carolina. The video is projected across a long wall in a darkened room filled with Tines’s resounding gospel song. The camera pans slowly between the serenity of the church, Tines singing, and the tree’s sinuous branches – forming a deeply moving spiritual tribute to the victims.
The fact that this exhibition is in the liberal bastion of California – where the recent removal of Confederate symbols sparked little to no controversy – raises the question of how it would be received elsewhere. Perhaps these ejected monuments would be more incendiary, or more invisible. But two artworks underscore how Los Angeles, or specifically Hollywood, was later complicit in sustaining Confederate myths. Stan Douglas’s video installation reimagines scenes from D.W. Griffith’s notorious film The Birth of a Nation (1915), a love letter to the Ku Klux Klan shot around Los Angeles. In another room, a towering equestrian Confederate statue faces a neon orange car, flipped 90 degrees with the hood crashed into the ground, emblazoned with the Confederate flag: Hank Willis Thomas’s A Suspension of Hostilities (2019) replicates the race car featured in the TV comedy The Dukes of Hazzard, which normalised ‘good ol’ boy’ Southern allegiance to the Confederacy as recently as the 1980s.

At the time of writing, a Confederate statue that had been removed in Washington, D.C. in 2020 was reinstalled following Trump’s recent executive order to ‘restore truth and sanity to American history’. The Civil War ended 159 years ago. Or perhaps it didn’t.

’Monuments’ is at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, Los Angeles, until 3 May 2026.

From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.